Urine Nitric Oxide Is Lower in Parents of Autistic Children

Lulu Yao; Kun Cai; Fanghua Mei; Xiaohua Wang; Chuangang Fan; Hong Jiang; Fang Xie; Ying Li; Lu Bai; Kang Peng; Wenwen Deng; Shenghan Lai; Jun Wang

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2021.607191

Urine Nitric Oxide Is Lower in Parents of Autistic Children

Front Psychiatry. 2021 May 21:12:607191. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.607191. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Lulu Yao^{1

2}, Kun Cai³, Fanghua Mei³, Xiaohua Wang⁴, Chuangang Fan³, Hong Jiang⁵, Fang Xie⁵, Ying Li⁵, Lu Bai^{1

2}, Kang Peng^{1

2}, Wenwen Deng^{1

2}, Shenghan Lai⁶, Jun Wang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ National 111 Center for Cellular Regulation and Molecular Pharmaceutics, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan, China.
² Department of Biomedicine and Biopharmacology, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan, China.
³ Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Wuhan, China.
⁴ School of Social Development and Public Policy, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
⁵ Department of Child Health Care, Huangshi Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital, Wuhan, China.
⁶ Department of Pathology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States.

Abstract

Parents raising children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) usually carry on their daily life under tremendous stress, but limited empirical research has been devoted to this population. It is known that parents' health status directly impacts therapeutic outcome of ASD children. As an important regulator in cardiovascular, nervous and immune systems, nitric oxide (NO) levels haven't been reported in parents of ASD children yet. In this study, we measured urine nitrite and nitrate from 43 ASD parents (ASD-P), and 43 healthy adults in the same range of age (Control) who didn't have any ASD descendants. Comparison between the ASD-P and Control groups showed that ${NO}_{2}^{-}$ , ${NO}_{3}^{-}$ , and ${NO}_{2}^{-}$ / ${NO}_{3}^{-}$ were all significantly lower in the ASD-P group. Analysis on the interaction effect of sex and group indicated that urine ${NO}_{3}^{-}$ of mothers in ASD-P was lower than that in females of the Control group, but no significant difference was observed between males in both groups. It is for the first time that urine nitric oxide metabolites (nitrite, nitrate) levels were precisely reported to differentiate parents of autistic children from other adults without ASD descendants. This phenomenon suggests that parents (especially mothers) of autistic children might have experienced more mental and physical stressors, which led to decreased NO levels during metabolism. Further investigations are necessary to uncover the etiology of low urine NO among parents of autistic children.

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder; nitrate; nitric oxide; nitrite; parents; urine.